Recorded music played in a pub, a song that pushes through your thoughts and seizes your attention, not itself the will, but the will to a wolfish will, the calculated expression of a rough wildness, farouche, the restrained readiness to go into a frenzy, but all its power at hand, only a fragile leash holding it back. And then in the next song that formerly indomitable Caliban-like spirit in submission, yoked and bound to a tight structure of rhymes, doing the will of another, resisting it and in that very resistance lending this hidden other all of its power. The flip from expression of wild autonomy to wild, but bound, heteronomy is remarkably facile; it is clearly the same essence pushing itself out and commanding attention in both modes. Is there a more immediate perception of will and the figures it casts in which active and passive phases are inextricable? (If the essence of will is the will to will, then by the same token it is the will to block willing, to oppose itself, since by that means it can will even more purely.) That morning on the tram there had been a small child having a tantrum. He was crying out, his tear-stained face pushed against the window, arms reaching back to some irreplacable lost object growing ever further away as we slid along the polished tracks. His mother was unable to distract or pacify him, it went on for ten minutes or more. An impressive performance, this tiny Lear, sheer raging, tragic will, in outraged howlings and furious buckings when his mother tried to hold him. His voice had that same arresting gravelly hoarseness as the recorded singer later in the day. The sound filled the narrow space with no let, perfectly distracting, a perfectly concentrated ball of will.